When panic attacks

Restlessness, Anxiety, Panic attacks…

The memory of panic attacks bring that horrible fear of experiencing this yet again. Going about my usual life, the job, the school, the street, friends, family, life, I find myself restless. I feel an awareness of the heart, heavy; a dull quickening of its pace, subtle yet noticeable…; the heart that is always pumping and that I never feel…

“All of a sudden, I felt a tremendous wave of fear for no reason at all. My heart was pounding, my chest hurt, and it was getting harder to breathe. I thought I was going to die.”

When I turn around searching for what has triggered the feeling, I look but see nothing; nothing is happening… it’s me…

Going about my usual life, the job, the school, …

Going about my usual life, the job, the school, the street, friends, family, life, I find myself restless; an awareness of the heart, heavy, a dull quickening of its pace, subtle yet noticeable…

Sometimes it comes at night in the form of the paranoid feeling of an assault, from the dark corners of the usual streets, the light-less lower floor of the house, the room at the end of the corridor. And filled with doubt, I look around me, behind, scared of the unknown…

I know I am not alone, I know if I shout someone will wake up, yet nothing calms me, no rest, just the anxious pace and the heart, pumping, anxious, but about what?

…and then panic attacks , what triggers it?

I am at a friend’s house, enjoying myself, laughing, a glass of wine, good company, nice chats about life, a book, a trip… and suddenly, tachycardia! It hits me directly in the heart, the running heart in flight and with this realization the anxiety: why? why me? what is happening? why now?…

Drowning – there is a first urgent need to say to Oneself “I am in panic” – only then we begin to allow our instincts to work properly

“I’m so afraid. Every time I start to go out, I get that awful feeling in the pit of my stomach and I’m terrified that another panic attack is coming or that some other, unknown terrible thing was going to happen.”

I understand the Restlessness, Anxiety, and Panic – in a silent or loud panic attacks -, as an emotion that the body triggers with varying intensities to call my attention to the chasm I have arrived at. A chasm between inner and outer aspects of life.

This chasm that has to be bridged so that life can continue to flow… into new spaces of meaning that in time will become part of a wider landscape. Somehow this inner answer clamours in ways that the pure medical diagnoses cannot see.

I feel the new flow of life when I step into the world full of energy, at one with myself, to face the world on its own terms, because I know my terms and can hold them in their place, my core… the world doesn’t rattle me and it feels as if it silently acknowledges that I have a place in it…

In my core the creative aspects of my life find new threads to weave into my personal work; the work I do that gives me that place in the world because it is unique, my work, my art, created through my experience…

Each time I feel restlessness, anxiety, or panic attacks, I know a new land is calling me, a rough rugged wild land is asking to be worked-on, a tough border is asking to be crossed…

…and, though scared and in panic, not feeling up to the job, with feelings of doubt and wishes of flight, I have to work on it, tend to it, care and get to know it. Because there are…the new mines, the sources and raw materials of my work, the ones that make me “I”… the simple beat of the heart…

… there are the new mines, the sources and raw materials of my work, the ones that make me “I”… the simple beat of the heart…